I’m working through a list of whole grains, treated in the same way - 1.5 days soaking in water, dried a little and cooked in a frying pan with salted butter. The rye grains are chewier than the spelt, which although not unpleasant (they would be good in a porridge) is not the point of the exercise, which is maximum crunchiness.

Two varieties of quince grown in the gardens of houses within half a mile of each other in South East London. Both are intensely sweet-smelling, the small one with a bright and almost citrussy note and the big scarred one with en ever-so-slight whiff of fermentation, which makes it smell something more like sea buckthorn. The fluff on the big quince must have quite a bit of yeast trapped in it, more so than the smooth one, and I will scrape it off this and a few others to start a quince mead.

Soaked in water for two days then dried a bit and fried in salted butter until they begin to burn. They are perfectly crunchy without being tough, hugely savoury and the darker grains have a similar taste to, and role as the intermittent burnt bits in popcorn, which is one of my all-time favourite ultra-specific niche flavours.

It takes a very short amount of time to devour a bowl. The time management of this snack could be improved

Here are two of the three jars of starter cultures that I gave to Dr. Lucy Gilliam to take aboard the Tres Hombres, a 32 metre brigantine which set sail yesterday from Holland on a seven month voyage trace the Atlantic trade routes. The project New Dawn Trader has been following this route since 2009, hoping to explore the possibilities and ramifications of trading by sail power, all the while operating and living as sustainably as possible.

Lucy will share the duty of cooking for the 20-strong crew from a tiny galley kitchen. I gave her three starters. The first is a sourdough culture, started in february with the yeast from two bottles of Kernel IPA and with the subsequent addition of wild yeast. The second jar contains a kombucha starter, born in Denmark aboard the good ship Nordic Food Lab with birch sap and a starter, and fed on Pu’er tea and raw cane sugar since April. The third jar (not pictured) is a ginger bug started in July.

The ship’s route takes her first to Norway, then over Scotland and Ireland before turning south for Lisbon. She will then cross the Atlantic to Brazil, and head north to the Caribbean then back east, and home, via the Azores.

The project is still seeking funding for various activities, you can see what and how to contribute on IndieGoGo. Follow them on Twitter here, and you can read Lucy’s blog here.

At Blanch & Shock, we have been experimenting with leaves from fruit trees recently, most notably fig leaves, which we have been making into tinctures and infusions. I picked some vineleaves from between the lethal tendrils of razorwire at Edible Eastside in Birmingham, thinking about the use of the leaves in Sarma (or Dolma, depending where you are) in which leaves are stuffed with rice and/or meat and boiled or steamed. I wasn’t planning on stuffing them necessarily, just seeing whether they could be encouraged to express a good flavour. It being the middle of summer, the leaves were quite dry and tough, and I wanted to avoid boiling them for hours as tradition dictated. Instead I left them submerged in a 5% salt brine with a sprig of bay for five weeks, hoping they would soften somewhat. After five weeks, they smelled good - lactic and vegetal and a little bitter, but were still tough and sort of crinkly. So they went into white wine vinegar, with the later addition of some Greek Yoghurt whey. In this solution they now sit, stubbornly refusing to become soft, but tasting great.

Tannins have the effect of keeping lactically-fermented pickles crisp, and this blog post contains some more information about their role in fermentation. Given the large amount of tannins in leaves, and later in the grapes that will follow, it could be that these leaves will never get soft enough to be served as they are, but could possibly still be wrapped around a stuffing and steamed or boiled. Incidentally the pickling brine, especially since the addition of vinegar and whey, has become kind of delicious, reminiscent of the taste of dolma. It may well find itself forming the basis of a new pickling brine for something else.

English-grown sweetcorn seems to have a very brief season, given our normal weather, but this summer’s sun has brought forth an abundance, and with this abundance comes a lot of potential waste.

Inspired by Dan Barber of Blue Hill in New York, who makes charcoal from all sorts of things that would end up thrown away (bones, lobster shells &c.) I decided that the cobs from all the sweetcorn should become fuel for future fires. Wrapping each cob in tin foil to prevent them from oxidising and disappearing, I baked them for about five hours at 200C.

I didn’t go far enough, as the slight amber colour in the picture shows, but they smell awesome when heated up again and I plan to grill over them if they can hold at an appreciable heat.

The husks are another useful product. In Mexican tamales, they are used to wrap masa dough tamales before steaming, but dried, they make an awesome smoking fuel. I’ve ground them to use in a Smoking Gun to smoke raw sweetcorn, and they make a great amber-coloured sweet smelling stock in the pressure cooker.

21 years ago, when I was ten years old, I planted a pip from an Cox apple bought from Safeway supermarket. My father, who has planted over 5000 trees in his life, prophesied doom - these apples, he said, are designed for eating, not growing and have been altered by scientists. They will not amount to much. Ever deaf to hyperbolic warning, I persisted, germinating the seed and leaving it with my dad to reluctantly nurture.

I visit the tree, labelled with a shiny black plaque “Malus - Joshua’s apple” and planted amongst twenty or so apple, pear and hawthorn trees, a few times a year. For seventeen years, the tree grew bolshily up inside the protective tube, never causing the tube the slightest bit of strain and producing but a handful of sickly, wrinkled leaves. Then, in it’s eighteenth year, long after it’s fate had been accepted and we had moved on, it crept over the edge of the tube, with a pathetic sort of flourish, blinking in the light that would eventually accelerate it’s growth.

After this minor, if long-awaited triumph, the tree blossomed, at least in the context of it’s stunted existence, and has been producing healthier looking leaves, spreading it’s canopy to escape the competition from the ‘normal’ trees around it and in year nineteen produced a crabapple, no bigger than a fifty pence piece. I hadn’t the heart to eat it - it had been nineteen years in the making and would have probably been unpalatably sour and astringent.

This year, there are two apples, slightly bigger than before, and the top of the tree stands at nearly 5’6”, still 7 inches shorter than me, standing as proud testament to the perseverance of a tiny seed from an apple produced intensively to supply a huge supermarket chain with high-yield, fast grown and gas-ripened fruit

After Blanch & Shock's recent forays into making tinctures, in particular a wicked fig leaf tincture made by Mike Knowlden, I picked some leaves from a tree in my brother’s garden in Gloucestershire. Having recently bemoaned the power of the British climate to fully ripen figs, I was surprised and amazed to find hundreds of the fruits, fully ripe, of which some were probably the best I have ever tasted. Since they wouldn’t travel well, I ate as many as I could, and contented myself with a bag full of leaves. Since the freakily sunny weather is over, and I am statistically unlikely to find as good a fig from this tree again, I will concentrate on using leaves for the incredible aroma they possess.

Duke blueberries from the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent in a jar with live Greek yoghurt whey. Inspired by a milky blueberry ferment made by Ryan Roadhouse many thousands of miles away in Portland, Oregon.

Both scobys come from the same source, a Birch Sap Mother from Nordic Food Lab. They are just over three months old. They have started to outgrow their jars, and so I have been sending pieces to other people who can nurture them and start their own kombucha obsessions.

The third image shows how the structure formed, layer by layer, over the last three months - generally speaking, a new feeding produces a new mat on the surface of the liquid which eventually joins up with the layers below, sometimes compacting into a homogenous mass. The furthest right round disk in the top image was around 1.5” thick before I sliced it horizontally.

These kombuchas have been fed on Pu’er tea, sucrose and honey. Sadly the ethereal, barely-there aroma of birch sap has vanished into the proverbial ether, but while the flavour exhibits nothing of it’s origins, its complexity is ever-increasing. I am using them as bases for all the other kombuchas I’m looking after, including bottles of strawberry, elderflower, gooseberry, lingonberry and cherry.

I left four sprigs of lavender in rectified spirit (79% ABV) for five days. Somehow the purple flowers resulted in a bright green infusion and then turned brown. It smells strongly of lavender, despite looking like something completely different

I climbed the elder tree in the back yard on three separate missions, armed with a deformed coat hanger, to harvest green elderberries. I have just over a kilo, which are vacuum packed with Maldon salt (5% by weight) - as they ferment they will detoxify, lose their bright colour, and start looking a lot like capers. After a couple of weeks, I’ll pack them into jars with spirit vinegar, infused with the elderflowers from the same tree, which I bottled about 6 weeks ago.

Cook the gooseberries, the powdered sugar, the pine shoot honey and the douglas fir in a vacuum sealed bag at 41°C (105.8°F) for four hours, squeezing the fruit inside the bag after two hours. Leave to infuse for twelve hours. Crush the fruit over a sieve and collect the gooey gooseberry concentrate. Simmer the skins, seeds, and fir needles in 250g water for half an hour. Cool and strain.

In a clean bowl, whisk together the gooseberry goo and stock, the cane sugar, the ginger and turmeric bug, the wine yeast and the cold-brewed tea. Add to a clean glass bottle. Add a cap of double layered cheesecloth held on with rubber bands.